The Book, Cat, & Cat Book Lovers Almanac

of historical trivia regarding books, cats, and other animals. Actually this blog has evolved so that it is described better as a blog about cats in history and culture. And we take as a theme the advice of Aldous Huxley: If you want to be a writer, get some cats. Don't forget to see the archived articles linked at the bottom of the page.

October 18, 2014

October 18, 1880

Vladimir Jabotinsky (October 18, 1880 to August 4, 1940), was a Zionist and his efforts to encourage emigration there seem today to have a sickening prescience. His childhood home was Odessa, his first career that of a Russian poet and journalist, but as a youth he set up self defense groups against pogroms. By the 30s (1936) he worked energetically to evacuate the entire Jewish population of Poland to Palestine.

At this time he himself was composing a novel that evoked his own childhood home in Odessa; his novel, The Five, (1935) paints a picture of a world he loved. In it h
e weaves local and cosmopolitan myths, by for example, recalling that," The mouse is sad to be caught in the cat's paws."

According to a book review of the latest of many biographies of Jabotinsky, (
Marat Grinberg's  in Tablet of Jabotinsky: A Life, by Hillel Halkin, ((2014)), The Five

...was ... an elegy about and a eulogy to the Russian-Jewish experience, ...[and] also the whole Jewish world which, to reiterate, Jabotinsky sensed was on the edge of extinction.

This is only superficially a contradiction-- international Zionism versus love of home,-- the kind of false dilemma academics love to churn up. In fact, Jabotinsky's

"... whole life projected the idea that one could be both: an artist and a politician, a Zionist and a citizen of the world."

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